Today is Holi, the world’s most colorful holiday

TODAY MARKS THE START of the Hindu festival of Holi. Holi is primarily celebrated in India and Nepal, and marks the end of winter and the beginning of spring. There are countless winter’s-end festivals around the world, and most of them fly under our radar here in the west. Holi is the exception, because Holi is easily the most colorful holiday on the planet.

The festival features a “color fight,” which is a raucous street party in which total strangers throw colored powders on each other.

The next morning, the festival that most of us recognize as Holi begins. Revelers stock up on colored powders, water guns, water balloons filled with a colored solution, colored foams, and go to town on anyone in sight.

The festival’s colorful and playful reputation has made its way to the west. In Spanish Forks, Utah, a massive Holi celebration (marketed “The Festival of Colors”) takes place outside the Sri Sri Radha Krishna Temple.

After the fights, people go spend time with their family and friends. The festival is about forgiveness and redemption, and this universal theme is perhaps the reason Holi is being celebrated more and more by non-Hindus. You know, that and the explosion of colors.

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